Dith Pran's Funeral

Buddhist monks pray next to the casket of New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran during his funeral service in South Plainfield, New Jersey, April 6, 2008. Dith is known for his experiences in his native country of Cambodia, where he was imprisoned and later escaped the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, "The Killing Fields." REUTERS/Chip East
Ser Moeun Dith prays over the casket of her former husband, at the funeral service for New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran, in South Plainfield, New Jersey, April 6, 2008. Dith is known for his experiences in his native country of Cambodia, where he was imprisoned and later escaped the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, "The Killing Fields." REUTERS/Chip East
New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg speaks at the funeral service for his close friend, New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran, in South Plainfield, New Jersey, April 6, 2008. Dith is known for his experiences with Schanberg in his native country of Cambodia, where he was imprisoned and later escaped the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, "The Killing Fields." REUTERS/Chip East
Former New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg delivers the eulogy during funeral services for New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran in South Plainfield, N.J., Sunday April 6, 2008. Dith was the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film 'The Killing Fields.' He was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

War reporter Jon Swain pays tribute to Dith Pran

New York Times photographer Dith Pran in a portrait taken in the 1980s

April 6, 2008
From The Sunday Times
Times Online (UK)

Jon Swain was about to be shot by the Khmer Rouge when Dith Pran intervened. The Sunday Times war reporter pays tribute to the courage of his friend, who died last week

Four years after his enslavement by the Khmer Rouge, an intrepid Cambodian stumbled out of the thickly wooded jungle to freedom. His legs were wobbly. He was weak with malaria. His front teeth were broken. His face was gaunt. He was incredibly thin – but he still retained his lopsided grin.

That grin was still in place – although fading – in the weeks before Dith Pran died last Sunday in a hospital in America, his adopted home, from pancreatic cancer. He was 65. Although wan and thin, he moved on gracefully, loved and mourned by all whose lives he had touched. “This is my path and I must go where it takes me,” he said shortly before the end.

Pran’s harrowing personal tale of enslavement and escape from the Khmer Rouge in 1979 had eventually become the subject of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffé, which focused global attention on one of history’s worst genocides.

Pran was justly famous. Were it not for this former tourist guide to the fabled Angkor temples, who later became interpreter and assistant to Sydney Schanberg, a reporter for The New York Times, in Cambodia, the world’s eyes would probably not have been opened to the monstrous atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in his native land. In its rush to forge a new society, 2m people died in executions or from starvation, disease and overwork – nearly a third of the population.

However, Pran did more. After his escape he moved to America, where he worked as a photographer for The New York Times and spent the rest of his life speaking out about what his countrymen had been through. He also pushed for war crimes trials for the Khmer Rouge leaders – trials that are finally due to begin this year in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Pran, alas, will never see them.

“I am a one-person crusade,” he once said. “I must speak for those who did not survive and those who still suffer.”

I owe this honourable Cambodian a debt of gratitude that I can never erase. He saved my life when I was captured by the Khmer Rouge.

At the time the Cambodian war was a sideshow to the war raging next door in Vietnam and some aspects of it seemed comic. Before sallying forth every morning into the countryside to witness the fighting, we reporters would meet at the Groaning Table – an open-air cafe – for a military briefing from a charming colonel called Am Rong, whose unfortunate name was a butt of endless jokes. His military communiqués, I remember, were invariably nonsense.

The seductive wartime capital, with its brothels and opium parlours, encouraged all kinds of indiscretions and we conducted our lives as though we were characters in a Graham Greene novel; or we liked to imagine that we did.

However, the war was deadly serious. So we also took insane risks and witnessed and reported on some of the most appalling human suffering that I have seen.

In the process more than 20 of the tiny foreign press corps of about 60 were killed in a matter of months by the Khmer Rouge, who never took prisoners. And many more Cambodian journalists also died.

We loved the Cambodians, who had a disarming insouciance in the face of danger. The difference between us and the band of local journalists we hired to interpret the language, politics and culture was that they were seeing and reporting on their own country being destroyed. We, on the other hand, were reporting from the privileged position of visitors who could always bail out. For them, there could be nowhere else to go: they and their loved ones were trapped by the war and their survival was dependent on the outcome.

It was Pran who was the unacknowledged dean of this Cambodian press corps, not because of the status that his job with the venerable New York Times gave him, but because he was so unusually acute and resourceful and had unassailable integrity.

The horrors of the war had made morality a luxury that many of his fellow countrymen had long since discarded. Yet, unlike so many of the politicians and generals for whom survival and money were the ultimate objectives, Pran remained faithful to his principles. He believed passionately that the story of the destruction of his beautiful homeland needed to be told. And to that end he risked his life time after time.

I first met Pran in 1972. Although his loyalty was always to Schanberg, he was ready to give help and advice to me and all the other journalists. Never more so than on April 17, 1975 – the day of the fall of Phnom Penh.

On that same day Schanberg, Al Rockoff, an American photographer, and I were captured by the Khmer Rouge.

A squad of teenage soldiers with hate-filled eyes forced us into a captured armoured personnel carrier (APC). Pran, realising we were going to be executed, selflessly argued to be allowed to join us inside, knowing full well that without his communication skills we were doomed.

It is this story that is told in The Killing Fields. And it was Dith Pran himself, by the way, who coined the phrase “killing fields” after seeing the grim piles of corpses and skeletal remains on his desperate trek to freedom.

That was in the future. Back when Pran volunteered himself as a prisoner, there seemed little hope of escape for any of us. First we were taken to the banks of the Mekong river; then the rear door of the APC opened and a pair of Khmer Rouge soldiers, pointing rifles, beckoned us out. We knew they were going to shoot us.

Pran got out first and began to talk softly and firmly, as he always did. He told the Khmer Rouge that we were neutral journalists who had come to report on their historic “liberation”; and, after a while, our would-be killers began to calm down. The tension suddenly evaporated and we were freed.

A few days later we tried to doctor one of my two British passports for Pran so that he could be evacuated with us to Thailand as a foreigner – but we failed.

The Khmer Rouge forced him to go into the countryside – by now becoming a giant labour camp – where he somehow survived torture, starvation and a life of unremitting hard toil.

When he emerged four years later, 50 members of his family had perished. Mercifully, Schanberg had evacuated Pran’s wife, Ser Moeun, and his four beloved children before Phnom Penh fell and they were safely in America.

The first I knew of his freedom was when I received a telegram from Schanberg, who had been tortured by guilt about Pran’s disappearance and had led his own one-man crusade to trace his helper and friend.

The telegram included a personal message from Pran, patterned on a Cambodian proverb: “Hi Jon. The world is round. Now I meet you again. Pran was in bad shape, but the life is remained. Love Pran.”

I still have it. In subsequent years I saw him several times back in Cambodia.

It is a place that takes over the soul, and those who have known it at its worst are irresistibly drawn back. We revisited old spots – including, once, the place on the riverbank where, blinking in the sunlight, we had stood facing the rifles of the Khmer Rouge peasant boys, waiting for the volley of shots that would kill us.

The slight man I had known had put on weight; he had adopted American food and habits and had a New Jersey twang. Beneath all that he was still the same Pran: warm and attentive, with that peculiarly Cambodian joie de vivre and a mischievous sense of humour.

His business card announced simply: “Dith Pran – photographer”. On the other side, however, it listed information about how the Khmer Rouge had ruined his beloved homeland.

Using his survival as a tool against injustice and genocide, he became a good-will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, founded a holocaust awareness project and compiled a book of children’s accounts of growing up under the Khmer Rouge.

It is given to few journalists to make a real difference to people’s lives. Once safe in America, Pran could have retreated into the background. Countless Cambodians did. But he saw it as his duty to stop the memory of what had happened to his country fading away. That and his courage and loyalty are what made Pran magnificent.

Latterly, friends said, he had become disappointed with the way Cambodia was becoming rotten again with corruption and cruelty. His marriage to Ser Moeun had broken up and another marriage had failed.

Despite personal setbacks, he bore his public role gracefully. Right to the end he always thought there was more that he could do, according to Schanberg, who spent many days attending to his dying friend.

“Pran was a true reporter – a fighter for the truth and for his people,” Schanberg said. “When the cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made [him] so special.”

Having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer too late for much hope of survival, Pran urged others to undergo early testing. “I want to save lives, including my own,” he said.

He had triumphed over the Khmer Rouge and outlived their leader, Pol Pot, who had turned Cambodia into a madhouse. But Pran knew deep down that the battle against cancer was one he could not win.

“Cambodians believe we just rent this body,” he said not long before he died. “It is just a house for the spirit; and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.”

In face of death, smile of life

April 6, 2008
By Jason George
Chicago Tribune

When Dith Pran, photojournalist for The New York Times, died last weekend, newspapers around the world recounted his harrowing tale of four years in the forced labor camps of his native Cambodia.

They wrote of his trials—Pran lost much of his family to the Khmer Rouge regime—and his triumph: He escaped in 1979, made his way to the United States and rejoined The Times, where he had worked before his capture.

Yet none of the obituaries mentioned a fact well-known among Pran's friends and family: Dith Pran loved to forward the cheesiest of e-mails.

Such messages are the online trading cards of grandparents and Net neophytes, full of colorful fonts, excessive exclamation marks and pictures of cuddly kittens. They were also Pran's pastime, and until he became too ill this winter with pancreatic cancer, not a week went by that he did not send one along to those in his address book.

For the longest time I did not understand how a man who had experienced so much death could revel so often at the sight of dancing puppies.

Dith Pran—Dith is his surname—and I first met in 2003, when I began a regular freelance assignment with The Times. I wrote mostly from New Jersey, where Pran also was based, and he photographed many of the stories I worked on during my two years there.

To say that I was intimidated on our first assignment together would be a gross understatement. I had repeatedly watched "The Killing Fields," the cinematic retelling of Pran's brave decision to remain and report in Cambodia as chaos overtook his beloved country.

Here was an icon, not just of journalism, but also of history—a man who had turned holocaust into humanitarianism, retelling his story to U.S. civic groups and schoolchildren in hopes that the horrors of the past would not be forgotten or repeated.

And yet here he was, riding shotgun in my battered Volvo sedan.

The Dith Pran of "The Killing Fields" was one of Buddha-like grace—an accurate portrait of the real man. But the everyday Pran also was a man of whimsical wit. It shone time and time again in those e-mails and elsewhere.

I remember he once forwarded a cartoon of the Geico gecko getting run over by a car. To me, it recalled a shocking scene in "The Killing Fields" when the actor portraying Pran ate a lizard raw, just as Pran actually did, to stave off starvation. To Pran, the e-mail was just funny.

A frequent electronic exchange with him often began: "How are you? Send joke."

Such lust for the small smiles in life carried over into his work. Pran's favorite assignment was to photograph "day shots"—pictures without stories attached—at beaches along the Jersey Shore. He would spend hours enjoying the sun, the surf and, yes, a glimpse of the occasional bikini.

The sight of humanity at its happiest—people enjoying both nature and leisure—may not have given Pran much of a break from his memories. But I suspect it confirmed for Pran that the world was better than its darkest chapters, better than the madness of killing 2 million of his countrymen.

For a man who once wrote, "The ghosts of the innocent will be on my mind forever," the Jersey Shore gave Pran hope that future innocents could remain just that.

In all my hours at Pran's side, I never once learned a wartime anecdote he had not told publicly before. On those rare occasions when we did discuss his homeland—I had visited his Cambodian village in 2000—he was clear-eyed about the past.

He preferred to remember his village as it was both before and during the nightmare of the late 1970s. I believe it was his way of acknowledging the yin and yang, the good and evil, that exist all around. Yet Pran also believed that the good could win out, and this kept him sharing his story, time after time, in school assembly halls, cafeterias and branch libraries.

Whenever some local newspaper would report on one of those talks, Pran always made sure to send the Web link of the article to his friends. Although I wondered at first why he would care about small-town attention after achieving worldwide celebrity, I soon realized that he wasn't forwarding them because of pride in himself, but pride that the story had again been told. It was a great life lesson, and also one about the need for humility in journalism.

It was a reminder that the subject trumps the teller—that the message means everything, the messenger nothing.

Jason George is a Tribune reporter.

Dith Pran, 'Killing Fields' hero, dies at 65

Undated file photo of Cambodian-born Haing Ngor in a scene from the movie "The Killing Fields". Ngor, 49, won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award in 1984 for his portrayal of Dith Pran. AFP File Photo

2008.04.04
by Dan Southerland
RFA

For a brief period in 1970, I had the privilege of working in wartime Cambodia with Dith Pran, who became famous as the New York Times interpreter who survived the Khmer Rouge and became the key figure in the movie “The Killing Fields.”

After reaching the United States, Pran became a photographer for The Times and started a center to teach people about the Khmer Rouge genocide.

He was the best interpreter and “fixer” with whom I worked in Cambodia. I remember him for his cheerfulness in spite of adversity, a quality that goes a long way in the middle of a war.

I was so impressed with Pran that I included some of his comments in a story that I wrote for The Christian Science Monitor.

It was during the first year of the five-year Cambodian War. Pran, 27 years old at the time, still hoped that his countrymen could prevail against seasoned North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. My story, dated Dec. 16, 1970, describes a road trip we took together through war-battered towns and villages north of Phnom Penh. Dith Pran died on March 30 at the age of 65.

Cambodians: ‘We are united’

Dec 16, 1970
By Daniel Southerland, Special correspondent
The Christian Science Monitor

While Americans debate whether Cambodia could become “another Vietnam,” one’s thoughts flash back to what a few Cambodians said on the subject several weeks ago.

We were traveling by car to Taing Kauk, the village where the Cambodian Army was stalled in its northward drive.

Our Cambodian interpreter, Dith Pran, a thin, friendly youth, used to guide tourists through the ancient ruins of Angkor. Now he guides journalists through the modern ruins of places like Skoun and Taing Kauk. His own home in Siem Reap, next to Angkor, has joined Cambodia’s new ruins. It was destroyed in fighting between the Cambodian Army and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

“This is not a civil war like the Vietnam war,” Dith Pran was saying as we neared the Tonle Sap ferry crossing. “This is a war of aggression.”

Unity stressed

“If we can get the right aid, we can win, because we Khmers are united as one block,” he said cheerfully. “We’re not divided like the Vietnamese.”

“We don’t want foreign troops here,” he said, but added that South Vietnamese troops would probably be needed a while longer in Cambodia, disliked though they were as ancient enemies.

On the battered outskirts of Skoun, we picked up two hitchhikers, both former schoolteachers, now, like so many others, with the Army. They were returning to Taing Kauk to see what was left of their homes now that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been driven out.

The first sights of Taing Kauk were not encouraging. Air strikes and artillery had bashed in the roof and walls of the school building which served as a Viet Cong headquarters.

Then we saw the home of Mam Saath, one of the teachers. Just a few pillars were left, standing in a pile of rubble. Not surprised at the loss of his home, Mam Saath and the other teacher left us then, smiling, bowing politely, thanking us for the ride.

Monks invited us to spend the night in Taing Kauk’s main Buddhist pagoda. It was particularly recommended by one and all, because its thick walls were good protection against mortar attack, and Taing Kauk was taking mortar fire almost every night at the time.

In the pagoda, two Cambodian civilian physicians, now attached to the Army, offered us a meal of American C rations purchased on the black market in Phnom Penh.

‘This is different’

“The American people think this is a civil war, don’t they?” said one of the doctors, opening an olive-green can of ham. He spoke French.

“But perhaps they’re beginning to understand, aren’t they?” he asked, a worried look on his face.

“This is different from the war in Vietnam,” he said.

The two physicians worked at the Soviet-built hospital in Phnom Penh, known as the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital. They told how the Russian physicians at the hospital refused to treat the war wounded who were arriving there with increasing frequency.

‘Now we know’

“In the past, we made a mistake about who our real friends were,” said one of the uniformed physicians, referring to the Sihanouk era of good relations with the Soviet Union. “Now we know who our friends are.”

The two Cambodians expressed the hope that the United States would become a true friend. They agreed that Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew’s visit to Phnom Penh in August was “symbolic” of American support for the Lon Nol government. Still, they seemed uncertain about how far the U.S. Government would go in helping them.

It was dark now, and overhead a heavily armed South Vietnamese Air Force plane took up its vigil, flying lazy circles, its lights blinking, providing protection for the Cambodian troops below.

Plane reassuring

The visiting newspaper reporter remarked that it was comforting to hear the sound of the Vietnamese plane overhead. It would be nice to have around in case of an attack.

“We don’t put much trust in the Vietnamese,” said one of the doctors, his voice suddenly grown cool.

“But the Vietnamese do have some good pilots,” said the reporter.

“Yes, and we could have good pilots, too, if somebody would train them,” the Cambodian said, his voice rising sharply.

"If only we had our own tanks and helicopters…,” said the other doctor.

I later learned that the South Vietnamese plane that had been flying overhead that night was shot down the next day. No one seemed to know, or care, if there were any survivors among the plane’s crew—men so needed, yet so detested, by the Cambodians they were supposed to protect.

Reprinted with permission of The Christian Science Monitor

Dith Pran's Funeral

Saturday, April 5

Viewing & family receiving guests: 2:00 - 4:00pm
at South Plainfield Funeral Home

Sunday, April 6

Funeral Service: 1 - 3 p.m.

South Plainfield Funeral Home
2456 Plainfield Avenue
South Plainfield, NJ 07080
Tel 908-756-2800

For additional information about direction and map, please click the link below:

www.southplainfieldfuneralhome.com

'Killing Fields' Survivor Dith Pran Passes

By Cheoung Pochin, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
01 April 2008

Dith Pran, a New York Times photographer and survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime whose plight was made famous by the film "The Killing Fields," died in New Jersey Sunday morning, friends of the deceased said.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer.

Sidney Schanberg, a former colleague at the Times and life-long friend, told VOA Khmer Dith Pran had been a determined reporter, staying in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge rose to power in order to document for the world the brutality of the regime and the story of the Cambodian people.

Born Sept. 23, 1942, in Siem Reap province, Dith Pran was captured by the Khmer Rouge after refusing to evacuate Phnom Penh with his family in 1975, instead staying to help Schanberg in his coverage of the conflict.

Schanberg has said that he and other journalists would have been killed by Khmer Rouge soldiers in April 1975 had Dith Pran not intervened.

Dith Pran escaped the "killing fields" in 1979 and was reunited with his family and Schanberg.

He continued to work as a photographer for the Times and to crusade for the plight of Cambodians still embroiled in conflict and poverty.

Dith Sermoeun was Dith Pran's first wife and mother of his four children. She was by his bedside during the final weeks.

Before his death, she said, his memory was slipping and he was able to say little.

Dith Pran: A gallant guide

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
By H. D. S. Greenway
The International Herald Tribune

The world got to know of Dith Pran, who died of cancer Sunday, through the power of movies, specifically "The Killing Fields," in which he was played by Haing Ngor, who won an Oscar for his performance.

I first got to know Pran - in Cambodia the first name often comes last - when he was a receptionist behind the desk of a hotel just outside the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. That was more than 40 years ago when Cambodia was at peace while the war raged throughout the rest of what was once French Indochina.

If you flew in from Vietnam you could always tell you had crossed over the Cambodian frontier when you saw a train moving on the ground. Trains didn't run very much in Vietnam in those days. But Cambodia was an oasis of calm. And Angkor Wat was something that war reporters longed to see, especially since there was no one shooting at you. Pran arranged evening elephant-back rides to a high hill overlooking the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's great inland sea.

But the ides of March 1970, saw a coup that deposed Cambodia's eccentric ruler, Norodom Sihanouk. The war he had so assiduously maneuvered to avoid overwhelmed Cambodia with a fierceness that would eventually overshadow Vietnam in cruelty and access.

When the tourist business abruptly shut down - the Khmer Rouge ultimately burned Pran's hotel to the ground - Pran, along with many of his colleagues, moved to the capital, Phnom Penh. There they found another, less wealthy and infinitely more dangerous group of clients, the foreign press, who desperately needed their services to get around in a country they knew little about.

Pran seemed to me to be the best of them. We worked together a couple of times, but when I tried to hire him permanently for The Washington Post, for which I was working, I got a polite no. He was signing up with Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times, and there began the extraordinary friendship that "The Killing Fields" portrayed.

I have often thought of those gallant guides and interpreters as similar to big-game hunters who would bring their exotic customers from overseas into close proximity to the dangerous beasts of war so that they could shoot their pictures and get their stories. If needs be they would risk their own lives to get their clients out of trouble.

It was these guides who taught us how to survive. If, for example, you came to a village and no children surrounded your car, you got out quick. For if the normally curious children were kept out of sight, then there was trouble in the neighborhood of which the adults might be too afraid to speak.

When the end came, and the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, Pran found his clients in more trouble than he could imagine. The fanatic Khmer Rouge were about to shoot Sydney, and his British colleague, Jon Swain, out of hand. Pran saved their lives by softly and persistently talking to their captors, who eventually let them go.

It was their white skins that immediately made Schanberg and Swain suspect, but later on it was their white skins and foreign passports that saved them in their refuge inside the French embassy. Pran's Cambodian skin almost cost him his life. Schanberg was unable to save Pran when the Khmer Rouge said all Cambodians had to leave the safety of the French Embassy compound, and so he slipped away, pretending to be an illiterate in a new genocidal society in which even to be able to read or write, or be caught with eyeglasses, was a death sentence.

The New York Times editor, Bill Keller, got it right when he spoke of a "special category of journalistic heroism - the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer who knows the ropes," and who makes the work of "foreign reporters in frightening places" possible.

This is especially true today in Iraq where some 150 Iraqis have died trying to get the news or help foreign reporters in very frightening places. They seldom get the credit they deserve, but the news would not come to you without them.

H. D. S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

Cambodia Remembers Dith Pran

Photojournalist Dith Pran, speaks at a meeting of the National Cambodia Crisis Committee at the White House as First Lady Rosalynn Carter (3rd R), wife of President Jimmy Carter, looks on in this January 29, 1980 file photo. Pran, whose harrowing experiences in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were dramatized in the film 'The Killing Fields,' died on Sunday at the age of 65. He died of pancreatic cancer at a New Brunswick, New Jersey, hospital, The New York Times said on its Web site. (The New York Times/Handout/Reuters)

By KER MUNTHIT

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist whose harrowing tale of survival was told in the movie "The Killing Fields," helped awaken the world to the Khmer Rouge's atrocities, people in his homeland said Monday.

Dith Pran, 65, died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at a New Jersey hospital, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times whose intertwined story was also told in the 1984 film.

Dith Pran was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, when the Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975. One of the movie's most tense scenes shows him risking his life to help save the Times reporter.

Schanberg was later evacuated from Cambodia with other Westerners, while Dith Pran stayed behind and struggled to survive under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.

The communist group's radical policies while in power in 1975-79 led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from hunger, disease, overwork and execution. The sites where their bodies were unceremoniously disposed of became known as "killing fields."

While Dith Pran was just one of the millions of people who suffered under the Khmer Rouge, he was "the pioneer" in exposing the group's atrocities, said Chea Vannath, the former director of the nonprofit Center for Social Development.

"What was special about him is that he brought the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" to the world," she said.

Information Minister Khieu Kanharith agreed that Dith Pran "was the one who played a key role for the world to become conscious about the killing fields."

Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent center researching the Khmer Rouge's crimes, said it was "a very sad thing" that Dith Pran had died before Cambodia's U.N.-backed genocide tribunal begins trying detained former Khmer Rouge leaders for their alleged roles in the atrocities.

But Dith Pran "continues to be with us now and in the future for the cause of genocide justice," he said.

Dith Pran managed to escape to Thailand in 1979 after Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge. He was later reunited with his family in the United States, where they had settled as refugees, and he became a photographer for the Times.

Dith Pran; Activist Brought Attention to Cambodian Genocide

New York Times photographer Dith Pran sits with his wife Meoun Ser on the lawn outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, in this Tuesday, March 26, 1985, file photo in Beverly Hills, Calif. Dith Pran's death from pancreatic cancer was confirmed Sunday, March 30, 2008, by journalist Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Pran was 65. (Lennox Mclendon - AP)

Obituaries

Monday, March 31, 2008
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Dith Pran, 65, a journalist and human rights advocate who became a public face of the horrors in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and whose life was portrayed in the influential movie "The Killing Fields," died March 30 of pancreatic cancer at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was a resident of Woodbridge, N.J.

For much of the early 1970s, Mr. Dith was a resourceful guide and interpreter in Cambodia for Sydney H. Schanberg of the New York Times, whose reporting on the country's civil war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge won a Pulitzer Prize. Schanberg accepted the award on behalf of himself and Mr. Dith, whom he credited with saving his life.

Schanberg's partnership with Mr. Dith became the basis for "The Killing Fields" (1984), which conveyed in personal terms the brutality of the Khmer Rouge under the despot Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Nearly 2 million Cambodians died during those years.

"The Killing Fields" had a major effect on public opinion, said Ben Kiernan, who directs Yale University's Genocide Studies Program. "A mass audience saw the story of what happened in a way that had never been done before, a dramatic and accurate depiction of a horrifying experience for millions of people," he said.

"Pran was one of the major figures in the United States in bringing the issue of justice for Cambodian genocide to public attention, and in pushing the U.S. government to support the accountability of the Khmer Rouge," Kiernan said.

In speeches and lectures, Mr. Dith gave vivid and compelling accounts of the genocide, including the death of more than 50 members of his family. During a famine, he said, he was nearly beaten to death for stealing more than the daily ration of a spoonful of rice. He was told that one of his brothers, who served in the Cambodian army, was thrown to crocodiles.

The Khmer Rouge, which followed a radical communist path of social engineering, tried to remake the country by killing anyone who had political opinions or seemed educated. Mr. Dith spent four years disguising his middle-class background by dressing as a peasant and working in rice fields.

Of the killing fields, or mass graves in the countryside, he once told Schanberg: "In the water wells, the bodies were like soup bones in broth. And you could always tell the killing grounds because the grass grew taller and greener where the bodies were buried."

Peter Cleveland, a foreign affairs expert then working for Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), said Mr. Dith worked to help influence passage of the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act of 1994.

The act, which Robb sponsored, created the State Department's Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, which gathered evidence against Pol Pot and his deputies for crimes against humanity.

Pol Pot died in Thailand in 1998 without answering to an international tribunal. U.N.-backed trials began last year, after years of resistance from Khmer Rouge supporters in China, Thailand and the United States.

The United States had supported the Khmer Rouge because it fought the communist Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia and occupied it in the 1980s. The Khmer Rouge held Cambodia's seat at the United Nations until the early 1990s.

Mr. Dith founded an organization to collect personal stories about Khmer Rouge crimes and compiled a book of survivors' memories, "Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields" (1997).

"There is no doctor who can heal me," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, when Pol Pot was protected in Thailand. "But I know that a man like Pol Pot, he is even sicker than I am. He is crazy in the head, because he believed in killing people. He believed in starving children. We both have the horror in our heads."

Mr. Dith, whose father was a public works official, was born in 1942 in Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat.

He learned French and English, and his language skills brought him work as a translator of Khmer, the Cambodian language, for the U.S. military and visiting film crews. He was a receptionist at a hotel near Angkor Wat when the escalation of the Vietnam War dried up tourism.

The subsequent U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the militarist coup led by Western-backed Cambodian Gen. Lon Nol and an erupting civil war led Mr. Dith, his wife, Meoun Ser, and their four children to flee to the capital city of Phnom Penh.

There, Mr. Dith became a favorite of the visiting press corps. He gained a reputation for adeptness at obtaining hotel rooms and bribing teletype operators to get stories out. He also knew how to bribe officials to win access to parts of the country otherwise closed to reporters.

He formed his closest working relationship with Schanberg, who said he came to regard Mr. Dith as his brother. "He got hooked on this story in the same way I did," Schanberg said. "Cambodia was ignored. The Western press corps was in Saigon. People only came in when things heated up. . . .

"He wanted the story of what was happening to get out," Schanberg said. "People in such a Third World country who are suffering did not know if anyone in the outside world understood what they were going through -- crude Chinese-made rockets landing in hospitals, schoolyards, people's back yards."

Mr. Dith's wife and children were able to leave Cambodia through Schanberg's connections at the U.S. Embassy. At great peril, the two men remained in the capital after the Khmer Rouge entered the city in April 1975.

At one point, bullying Khmer Rouge soldiers robbed Schanberg and two English-speaking colleagues of their equipment and forced them aboard a truck likely bound for their execution.

Schanberg credited Mr. Dith with their survival: Mr. Dith pleaded to board the truck and persuaded the driver that the reporters were French and were there to cover the Khmer Rouge victory with sympathy.

In Phnom Penh, Schanberg was able to obtain safe passage to Thailand through the French Embassy, but Mr. Dith was among the many Cambodians turned away after the Khmer Rouge threatened embassy officials about awarding passports to help locals escape.

He found work in rice fields near his home village. Like others, he was reduced to daily rations of a spoonful of rice plus whatever snails, rats, insects and tree bark he could find. Any excuse was used to beat or execute people, including unauthorized work breaks.

After months of extreme malnourishment, Mr. Dith said, he took a risk one night by sneaking into a rice paddy to steal rice kernels. Two guards caught him and ordered villagers to beat him. He was left bleeding in the rain.

After the Vietnamese invasion, Mr. Dith began searching for his family. Only his mother and one sister had survived. The rest had starved or had been executed.

Seeking refuge in Thailand, he traveled a circuitous route of 60 miles, careful to avoid bands of Khmer Rouge soldiers, unmarked mine fields and other dangers. He was accepted into a refugee camp and was treated for malaria.

The New York Times arranged for his safe passage to New York and trained him to work as a staff photographer, a position he held since 1980,while also assuming a greater role as an activist.

"The Killing Fields," starring Sam Waterston as Schanberg and Haing S. Ngor as Mr. Dith, elevated his name recognition. Ngor, a Cambodian doctor-turned-actor, won an Academy Award for his supporting role. Ngor was killed in a robbery in 1996.

Soon after the film's release, Mr. Dith became a U.S. citizen and goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

"I'm not a politician. I'm not a hero. I'm a messenger," he said. "It's very important that we study genocide because it has happened again and again. We made a mistake because we didn't believe Cambodians would kill Cambodians.

"We didn't believe that one human being would kill another human being. I want you to know that genocide can happen anywhere on this planet. . . . Like one of my heroes, Elie Wiesel, who alerts the world to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust, I try to awaken the world to the holocaust of Cambodia, for all tragedies have universal implications."

His marriages to Meoun Ser Dith and Kim DePaul ended in divorce.

Survivors include four children from the first marriage, Titony Dith of Herndon, Hemkarey Tan of Silver Spring and Titonath Dith and Titonel Dith, both of Lynwood, Wash.; a sister; and eight grandchildren (including one named Sydney).

Rhode Island Cambodians recall Dith Pran

Monday, March 31, 2008
By Karen Lee Ziner and DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Journal Staff Writers
Providence Journal (Rhode Island, USA)

PROVIDENCE — Dith Pran’s story, immortalized in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, symbolized that of thousands of Cambodian refugees who now call Rhode Island home. His death from cancer yesterday touched the hearts of people here who believe that if not for Dith, the world might not have recognized their suffering.

Dith, 65, a photographer for The New York Times, was the assistant to Times reporter Sydney Schanberg when Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

Schanberg helped Dith’s family escape, but Dith was captured by the Khmer Rouge and disappeared into the Cambodian holocaust. He was not heard from until he fled Cambodia and made his way to a Thai refugee camp four years later.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of Cambodian refugees were resettled in Providence, Fall River and Lowell, Mass., whose Cambodian communities are among the largest in the country.

Pich Chhoeun, former president of the Cambodian Society of Rhode Island who spent nearly six years in Cambodian refugee camps, said he was delighted when Dith agreed to speak at the society’s New Year celebration several years ago.

“My impression of Dith Pran was that he was a person who was very passionate about the Cambodian community, and he was very committed to share the story of the Cambodian agony and suffering with the rest of the world, as well as the generations after the war,” Chhoeun said.

“Without Dith Pran, I don’t think people would be aware of the Cambodian struggle as much as they have for the last 30 years or so. His life, his story — certainly the movie — I think contributed to allowing people internationally to know what happened in Cambodia.”

Chhoeun said Dith advised him to use his leadership role to both serve and advocate for his community. That included encouraging Cambodians to become citizens and to get involved in the political process by casting their votes.

“I think it’s understandable why he stressed that,” said Chhoeun, “because back home in our country, before and after the war, this whole idea of being able to voice your opinion was not something that you could do without retribution.”

Sovan Chhouk, current president of the Cambodian Society of Rhode Island, said he was “very, very upset” to hear of Pran’s death and described an entire community in mourning.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Journal began reporting on the Cambodian refugees’ struggles to assimilate, even as they remained gripped by trauma of war. Many refugees derived spiritual sustenance at a Buddhist temple on Hanover Street in the city’s West End, founded by The Venerable Maha Ghosanada, a monk who was nominated six times for a Nobel Peace prize before his death one year ago.

Dith made numerous visits to Rhode Island to speak on the Cambodian holocaust. In 1990, he received an honorary degree from Rhode Island College. In 2002, he spoke at a cultural event, “The Spirit of Cambodia, a Tribute,” cosponsored by the Rhode Island Foundation, the Rhode Island School of Design and Providence College.

Sina Bieu, a social worker for the Providence School Department, recalled meeting Dith when he came to speak at Butler Hospital in the late 1980s.

“When he came to Rhode Island, he met us and asked, ‘Why don’t you dress up in the Cambodian outfit?’ He wanted us to keep our tradition alive.”

In 1987, Dith expressed his hope that neither the Cambodian holocaust, nor any other, be forgotten, including by pushing to bring the Khmer Rouge before the World Court to find justice for the Cambodian people. He wanted a peaceful solution to his country’s problems.

“Let them help by diplomatic mission, not by gun,” Dith said. “I believe that if something is burning, you have to use water, not gasoline.”

Theanvy Kuoch, executive director of the Khmer Health Advocates, in West Hartford, Conn., in 1992 accompanied a Journal reporter to Cambodia for a series of stories on Cambodians’ return from Thai refugee camps to their homeland.

Kuoch said, “Perhaps what we will remember most about Pran is that despite his great suffering, he never wanted revenge. He understood that violence and war steals man’s ability to understand the suffering of others and that this disconnection can create monsters. He used his story to reach out to the compassion of others and to desperately try to melt the pain of the young generation of Cambodians who are the true victims of events for which they have no memories.”

Sokvann Sam, a longtime advocate for the Cambodian community, said, “Many of us feel he was a big part of that process for justice for all of us who were the victims of the Khmer Rouge. He was one of the strong advocates to try to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice.” To date, that has not happened.

“Many of us who have known him, we just kind of prayed for his health and hoping he would survive, but the disease was too profound and he could not be saved.” Sam added, “Without his story, the world would not know who we are.”

kziner@projo.com

Our sincere condolences to Mr. Dith Pran's Family and Friends

Photojournalist Dith Pran, smiles during his assignment in New York in this file photo taken in 1980. Pran, whose harrowing experiences in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were dramatized in the film "The Killing Fields," died on Sunday at the age of 65. He died of pancreatic cancer at a New Brunswick, New Jersey, hospital, The New York Times said on its Web site. REUTERS/The New York Times/Handout
The New York Times photographer Dith Pran is shown in this handout photo taken on March 29, 2004. Dith, whose harrowing experiences in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were dramatized in the film "the Killing Fields", died on March 30, 2008 at the age of 65. REUTERS/The New York Times/Handout
This photo provided by David Barron shows New York Times photographer Dith Pran, Saturday Feb. 9, 2008. Dith Pran's death from pancreatic cancer was confirmed Sunday, March 30, 2008, by journalist Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Pran was 65. (AP Photo)

'Killing Fields' survivor Dith Pran dies

Sun Mar 30, 2008
By RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday, his former colleague said.

Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago.

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.

Schanberg helped Dith's family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

It was Dith himself who coined the term "killing fields" for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people.

"That was the phrase he used from the very first day, during our wondrous reunion in the refugee camp," Schanberg said later.

With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence — even wearing glasses or wristwatches — Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch.

After Dith moved to the U.S., he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.

He was "the most patriotic American photographer I've ever met, always talking about how he loves America," said AP photographer Paul Sakuma, who knew Dith through their work with the Asian American Journalists Association.

Schanberg described Dith's ordeal and salvation in a 1980 magazine article titled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran." Schanberg's reporting from Phnom Penh had earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

Later a book, the magazine article became the basis for "The Killing Fields," the highly successful 1984 British film starring Sam Waterston as the Times correspondent and Haing S. Ngor, another Cambodian escapee from the Khmer Rouge, as Dith Pran.

The film won three Oscars, including the best supporting actor award to Ngor. Ngor, a physician, was shot to death in 1996 during a robbery outside his Los Angeles home. Three Asian gang members were convicted of the crime.

"Pran was a true reporter, a fighter for the truth and for his people," Schanberg said. "When cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made my brother so special."

Dith spoke of his illness in a March interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., saying he was determined to fight against the odds and urging others to get tested for cancer.

"I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body," he said. "It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave."

Dith Pran was born Sept. 27, 1942 at Siem Reap, site of the famed 12th century ruins of Angkor Wat. Educated in French and English, he worked as an interpreter for U.S. officials in Phnom Penh. As with many Asians, the family name, Dith, came first, but he was known by his given name, Pran.

After Cambodia's leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, broke off relations with the United States in 1965, Dith worked at other jobs. When Sihanouk was deposed in a 1970 coup and Cambodian troops went to war with the Khmer Rouge, Dith returned to Phom Penh and worked as an interpreter for Times reporters.

In 1972, he and Schanberg, then newly arrived, were the first journalists to discover the devastation of a U.S. bombing attack on Neak Leung, a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with eastern Cambodia.

Dith recalled in a 2003 article for the Times what it was like to watch U.S. planes attacking enemy targets.

"If you didn't think about the danger, it looked like a performance," he said. "It was beautiful, like fireworks. War is beautiful if you don't get killed. But because you know it's going to kill, it's no longer beautiful."

After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 and seized control of territory, Dith escaped from a commune near Siem Reap and trekked 40 miles, dodging both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge forces, to reach a border refugee camp in Thailand.

From the Thai camp he sent a message to Schanberg, who rushed from the United States for an emotional reunion with the trusted friend he felt he had abandoned four years earlier.

"I had searched for four years for any scrap of information about Pran," Schanberg said. "I was losing hope. His emergence in October 1979 felt like an actual miracle for me. It restored my life."

After Dith moved to the U.S., the Times hired him and put him in the photo department as a trainee. The veteran staffers "took him under their wing and taught him how to survive on the streets of New York as a photographer, how to see things," said Times photographer Marilynn Yee.

Yee recalled an incident early in Dith's new career as a photojournalist when, after working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, he was robbed at gunpoint of all his camera equipment at the back door of his apartment.

"He survived everything in Cambodia and he survived that too," she said, adding, "He never had to work the night shift again."

Dith spoke and wrote often about his wartime experience and remained an outspoken critic of the Khmer Rouge regime.

When Pol Pot died in 1998, Dith said he was saddened that the dictator was never held accountable for the genocide.

"The Jewish people's search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people's search for justice doesn't end with Pol Pot," he said.

Dith's survivors include his companion, Bette Parslow; his former wife, Meoun Ser Dith; a sister, Samproeuth Dith Nop; sons Titony, Titonath and Titonel; daughter Hemkarey Dith Tan; six grandchildren including a boy named Sydney; and two step-grandchildren.

Dith's three brothers were killed by the Khmer Rouge.
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AP News Research Center contributed to this report.